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Bob Perry is a Sydney-based architect who has, for many years, been researching positive aspects of density in urban living. He believes that the fate of our cities is more a result of our attitudes and desires than of policy and infrastructure. In this regard, he believes we have reached a point where an imbalance between our public and our private lives needs to be reconciled as a prerequisite to enjoying a sustainable life. Here he reflects on these issues.

AGORADYNAMICS

by Bob Perry

posted 05/03/11Ideas for discussion "By Design" ABC Radio National - 28 June 2008

During the suburbanisation of our cities the social complexion of the city has drifted further away from shared public identity towards private, privatised and independent identities. We live in an era where the ‘self’ has assumed an almost cult status and individualism and privacy are valued more highly, and more widely, than ever before.

If this is true, and leaves us vulnerable to dangers such as oil dependency, then we need to debate the form of our cities from fundamental perspectives that include our cultural beliefs and customs. Sociologist, Richard Sennett has written widely on this subject and has described importantdistinctions between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ mindset, and how this has dramatically changed, in the west, since the 18th Century.

Sennett describes 18th Century life, as an era when having a ‘public’ persona was an essential survival skill. Those who didn’t speak up in the marketplace and didn’t keep up with the marketplace were exploited. Dress was highly codified to assist in dealing with strangers. Coffeehouses acted as a public agora where ideas were exchanged, expertise was sold and expert services were promoted through printed leaflets prior to the advent of newspapers and later mass communication. Lloyds of London began as a coffeehouse.

In 1852, Aristide Boucicault opened a retail store in Paris called Bon Marché. Horse-drawn streetcars along newly constructed boulevards enabled patronage from formerly insular arrondissements . With the rise of the department store the public realm as an active interchange began togive way to an experience of publicness more intense and less sociable. Sennett writes, “The store was based on threenovel ideas. The markup on each item would be small, but thevolume of goods sold large. The price of goods would be fixed,and plainly marked. Anyone could enter his shop and browsearound, without feeling an obligation to buy.”

So began, with fixed prices, shopping as a personal and passive activity. Sennett goes on to describe how this situation grew into one whereby the new passive role of the consumer enabled buyers to invest objects with personal meaning above and beyond their utility, as a boost to consumerism.

Here is an interesting relationship between new urban transport systems and the beginnings of mass shopping and brand marketing. Further technologies and inventions took many decades to come before we adopted the supermarket and category killer formats of today. Clarence Saundersregistered a patent for the ‘self-service store’ and, in 1916 opened his Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis Tennesee – the world’s first supermarket. It wasn’t until 1937 that the first supermarket trolley appeared and customers had to be trained to break old habits to use it.

Our current shopping habits, and with them our extremely privatized experience of the public domain, have a history stretching back a hundred and fifty years of technological innovation and manipulation. From carport to carpark and back to carport, we can now shop for all our essential needswithout speaking to anyone.

During the same period we have taken most of the amenities that were once public, into our own private possession at home, including these days swimming pools, cinemas, espresso machines and commercial style kitchens.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that our carbon footprint is so large, with the entire historical amenity of a village built into each house. Is our ‘standard of living’ the baroque of consumption, curiously coupled with a peak in social insularity?

Most urban geographers, demographers and social commentators evaluate alternative urban forms in quantitative terms, such as density, and emphasise statistical data. Such analysis tends to isolate the housing unit itself as the sole host of behaviour. Apartments are generally described asautonomous commodities comparable to houses when, in reality, they depend on many shared amenities
that are notprerequisite to suburban housing.

The pervasive Australian experience of the suburban house, as an autonomous unit, is limiting our ability to describe all alternative futures for our cities. Underlying most analysis is the notion that Australians prefer suburban houses to apartments.

Missing from this debate is an understanding of the role of public amenity in dense urban living. Within Australia, our understanding of dense urban living is constrained by a lack of precedents. Apartments have been built as commodities without any of the public amenity that is necessary forsuccessful communities. We have built dense housing as though the context were suburban. Independent dwelling units have been packed into neighbourhoods without the rich veins of supporting shared amenity. Is it any wonder that Australians prefer houses?

Hugh Stretton believes that we must confront the current environmental menace like a war, using ‘radical action, self-restraint and sacrifice’. It is difficult to progress from a platform of guilt and fear. The suburbs were built through energy, desire and belief that we would have a better life.The package seemed attractive, even compelling, before its limits were understood.

We need to embrace density anew, not because we believe we are retreating from a preferable dream, but because it is, for many, a more enriching way to live. I believe we need to employ radical action, imagination and energy in the framework of a bold new adventure. Survival requires adrenalin, strategy and co-operation, not passivity, consumption and technology assisted agoraphobia.

An important path to sustainability is through the enriching of the public domain, where common facilities can bring economies of scale and more prudent use of resources into play. Dense cities, through necessity, share more amenities than do suburban cities. A safe, clean and engaging publicdomain is the essential ingredient for localisation.

The rich cultural life of the street in dense cities can be shared as entertainment. The street is the ultimate, self producing, self-sustaining interactive medium. Reality will be the death of Reality TV.

Blindsided by our obsession with independence and individuality, the public realm is lacking even a basic language of appreciation when compared with the detail with which we celebrate our private domains.

We are having difficulty discussing density in Australia because we have poor shared experience of the pleasures of an active public domain.

The ancient Greek agora was perhaps the first formally articulated public domain. The agora was essential to business as a place where verbal contracts were witnessed in the absence of practical media to record them. As the busiest place in the city, it attracted advocates of anythingrequiring consensus. It probably spawned politics and public life.

Underpinning the civic and social amenity of the agora was its more primal, and probably its original function, the marketplace. Growing around traditional crossroads, the agora was the first shopping centre.

‘Agoraphobia’ is the only other word in our language that derives from ‘agora’. Agoraphobia, commonly misunderstood as the fear of open space, is actually fear of the marketplace, fear of going out, fear of people.

If such a condition exists in the human psyche then it is reasonable to assume that an opposite condition might also exist – ‘agoraphilia’, or the love of going out, love of the public domain.

I think it was agoraphilia that we experienced during the Olympic Games in Sydney, that feeling of being somewhere special, a feeling defined by large numbers of people being out in a trusting atmosphere with common purpose. It takes special events like the Olympic Games to draw private Sydney residents from their suburban recluse. In cities like Tokyo it happens every day.

Perhaps we need a complete raft of terms to help describe the public domain and the ways we move through it. The field of ‘agoradynamics’ would help us to analyse attributes of life in urban situations. Importantly, the adjective could help to debate whether things are, or aren’t, ‘agoradynamic’.Perhaps more importantly, we could ascribe ‘anagoric’ characteristics to phenomena that inhibit the well being of the public domain.

Agoraphobia / n. Psychol. an abnormal fear of open spaces or public places.

Agoradynamics / n .the study of the interaction between the city and people moving through it.

Agoraphilia / n. Psychol. a normal love of open spaces or public places.